Is Fox News Dying?
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Sunday, January 12, 2025 19:40
VIEWED: 3396
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There are several articles out there claiming it is. I'd like to believe them, certainly the numbers make a valid point, but as long as there is they're out there, and people listen to their lies and fraud, they're still dangerous to our country, in my opinion.Quote:
Fox News Is Dying: For the Second Straight Year the Network Adds No New Viewers
The new Pew State of the Media report confirmed that Fox News could be facing future economic woes because for the second straight year they have failed to add any new viewers.
According to Pew, Fox News and MSNBC continued to grow and reach record profits, but their growth came at a slower rate. The difference between the two is that MSNBC was the only cable news network to experience ratings growth across the board. Over at Fox News, there are could be some ominious storm clouds growing, “And Fox News Channel, though still by far the ratings leader, saw viewership figures that, by at least one critical measure, were flat—even in an election year. That could curb its robust economic growth in the years to come.”
Pew also detailed the fact that Fox News’ viewership numbers have gone flat, “Fox News Channel, which still has higher ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined, experienced weaker ratings gains than MSNBC. That comparatively small growth was striking given that 2012 was an election year, playing to Fox’s near singular focus on political news. During daytime hours, Fox was up 4%. Across the total 24-hour day, Fox was up just 2%. And in prime time, Fox was basically flat (with a loss just under 1% compared to its 2011 median viewership). This follows two years of small but real prime-time declines for the top cable news channel and may suggest that the challenge of growing an audience on cable can extend beyond CNN and HLN.” http://www.politicususa.com/2013/03/18/fox-news-dying-straight-year-ne
twork-adds-viewers.htmlQuote:
Fox News continues to be near the top in cable television in terms of the number of viewers it attracts, but it is near the top in another category, too: the median age of its audience is among the oldest in television.
For most of the television business — the segment that relies on advertising — that would be serious cause for concern because ad sales are almost always based on a target age of 25 to 54, and Fox News, for the last two years, has had a median age of 65-plus in its ratings both for the full day and for prime time.
Fox News declined to make executives available for comment, but several recent signs — including changing personalities for some of its weekday programs — suggest the network may have decided the time has come to confront the issue of age.
Just how old is its audience? It is impossible to be precise because Nielsen stops giving an exact figure for median age once it passes 65. But for six of the last eight years, Fox News has had a median age of 65-plus and the number of viewers in the 25-54 year old group has been falling consistently, down five years in a row in prime time, from an average of 557,000 viewers five years ago to 379,000 this year.
“The numbers indicate they haven’t been replacing the younger viewers,” Mr. Moffett said of Fox News. Many of the loyal viewers the network has always had are simply aging up beyond the 54-year cutoff for many ad buyers. The result is an audience edging consistently above that 65-plus number.
In terms of the rest of television, Fox News also is quite a bit older than networks considered to have a base of older viewers. CBS has frequently been needled for having older viewers, but at 56.8, its median viewer is far younger than Fox News’s. More at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/business/its-viewers-are-graying-but
-their-passion-pays-for-fox-news.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3
While it's sad that FauxNews can still brainwash so many Americans, maybe as those people age and die off, so will that right-wing propaganda machine.
I found this interesting, som
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Quote:
...is the loudest voice in the room only in the sense that a bawling baby is the loudest voice in the room. In being so easily bullied by .....'s childish provocations, the left gives the network the attention on which it thrives and hands it power that it otherwise has lost.
Quite appropo, no?
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Somebody's watching them.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/01/27/cable-news-ratings-for-fri
day-january-24-2014/232141/
"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."
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Dying, nah. They'll be around for a good long while.
But their power is waning, I agree. Their audience is ageing out of power, and they're not drawing in youth.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
Somebody's watching them.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/01/27/cable-news-ratings-for-fri
day-january-24-2014/232141/
"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."
Sure, but who? Old folks, slipping away, by and large.
And if what you righties insist is true, that all non-Fox media is liberal, well then, the other networks combined add up to about the same audience. That audience is just listening to a wider collection of voices, rather than just one.
Young voters don't watch any of them - but still lean left. Ratings aren't everything.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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What's most amusing to me about righties puffing out their chests and boasting about FauxNews having the "highest ratings" is that it's only among CABLE TV viewers, which are a proportionally small news-viewing audience:
Quote:
The numbers in this report dovetail with other data about television news viewership. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey of news consumption habits shows that local television remains the most popular way of accessing news. And Pew Research’s annual State of the News Media report shows that the nightly network newscasts draw far larger audiences than the prime-time cable news shows.
The data in this study was prepared specifically for the Pew Research Center by Nielsen, the primary source of ratings and viewership information for the television industry. This comparison of in-home network and local television, cable and internet news consumption offers a unique look at how people get news across different platforms in a rapidly changing media environment. It is based on Nielsen’s national panel of metered homes. http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/11/how-americans-get-tv-news-at-home/
It goes on to show how cable-news-junkies are just that, junkies, compared to everyone else, and spend twice as much time watching cable "news" than everyone else:
But that's okay; for me, it was gratifying to know that at least FauxNews' "great" ratings are among a minority of the population, apparently an aging one and a shrinking one. Given all that, hopefully time will take care of the problem.
"the other networks combined add up to about the same audience." Actually, Mark, from the above and everything else I've seen, the other channels combined make up FAR more viewership than FauxNews. Apparently FauxNews gets its "high ratings" from a group of people who watch little else, while the rest of the population is spread around local, network and other cable sources. Kinda puts things in perspective.
I rarely watch any cable news anymore, and gave up watching network ANYTHING years ago (except Castle, out of loyalty). Too much bullshit.
And yeah, Mal4, that's a valid point, the very one his article was making. You should read the rest, it's a funny article.
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Trouble is, Fux News is not a ratings-driven enterprise-- it's a propaganda engine. It wouldn't matter if NO ONE watched, as long as Murdock and Ailes and their corporate rulers are willing to spend the money.
I don't know how they do on ad revenue-- if their ratings go down, they won't be able to charge advertisers as much, and they may become a drag on the network profits, but as long as fat cats are still willing to subsidize them, they won't die.
But someday they'll cost too much; and rich guys won't want to bother with propaganda anymore; and then, WHACK!; they'll be gone overnight, ratings be damned.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
"the other networks combined add up to about the same audience." Actually, Mark, from the above and everything else I've seen, the other channels combined make up FAR more viewership than FauxNews.
You're correct. I should have been more specific, I was referring to comparable cable news outlets. But yeah, factor in the networks and local, and they blow all the cable news away.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Trouble is, Fux News is not a ratings-driven enterprise-- it's a propaganda engine. It wouldn't matter if NO ONE watched, as long as Murdock and Ailes and their corporate rulers are willing to spend the money.
Yes and no. A propoganda machine can function without viewers - but if no one is paying attention, does it matter?
Of course, plenty do pay attention, but they are, by and large, the "choir" already.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Ah, what the hell, here's some snippets:Quote:
Stop Beating a Dead Fox
The conservative news channel’s only real power is in riling up liberals, who by this point should know better.
“There ain’t no sanity clause,” Chico Marx told Groucho. There is also no Santa Claus. And there was no sanity in the Santa fracas that became an embarrassing liberal-media fixation just before Christmas. For those who missed it, what happened was this: A Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, came upon a tongue-in-cheek blog post at Slate in which a black writer, Aisha Harris, proposed that Santa be recast as a penguin for the sake of racial inclusiveness. After tossing this scrap of red meat to her all-white panel of prime-time guests, Kelly reassured any “kids watching” (this was nearing 10 p.m.) that “Santa just is white.” (For good measure, she added, “Jesus was a white man, too.”) Soon and sure enough, Kelly’s sound bites were being masticated in op-ed pieces, online, and especially on cable, where a passing wisecrack best left to the satirical stylings of Stewart and Colbert became a call to arms. At CNN, one anchor brought on Santas of four races to debunk Kelly. BuzzFeed reported that MSNBC programs hopped on the story fourteen times in a single week.
Of course what Kelly said was dumb. But the reaction was even dumber. Every year, Fox News whips up some phantom “war on Christmas” plotted by what the network’s blowhard-in-chief Bill O’Reilly calls “secular progressives.” This seasonal stunt has long been old news, yet many in the liberal media still can’t resist the bait. You had to feel for the NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, who was drafted into filing a Kelly-Santa story on the Today show for no discernible reason other than that she is not white.
Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine and at times (if not this one) a racist enterprise (witness, among other examples, its fruitless effort to drum up a “New Black Panther Party” scandal over some 95 segments in the summer of 2010).
“The cable audience, for all the attention heaped on it for its theoretical political sway, is not that large.” To put it mildly. As the overwhelming leader in its field, Fox draws just over a million viewers in prime time—a pittance and a niche next to even the ever-declining network newscasts, of which the lowest rated (CBS Evening News) still can attract a nightly audience as large as 8 million.
Fox News’s political sway in the real world, as opposed to its power to drive MSNBC viewers and their fellow travelers nuts and to generate ridicule from late-night comics, is also on the wane. Speaking to the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles in January, Jeff Zucker complained like countless before him that Fox is an arm of the GOP “masquerading as a cable-news channel.” It doesn’t take rocket science to figure that out: No fewer than five Republican presidential hopefuls, not to mention Karl Rove and Glenn Beck, were on-camera as paid Fox personalities at the start of the 2012 election season; Murdoch is a GOP donor; and Ailes is a former Republican political operative whose partisan record extends back to his big break as Richard Nixon’s media guru in 1968. But there’s nothing in Fox’s viewership numbers, either in magnitude or in demographic hue, to suggest that there’s a significant number of voting-age Americans who at this point do not already know that Fox News is a GOP auxiliary and view it, hate-watch it, or avoid it accordingly. The masquerade that Zucker seems to find a revelation was unmasked years ago.
Back at its creation, in 1996, Fox News was a true stealth threat to the body politic. The network was assumed by many viewers to be as advertised: a good-faith competitor to CNN, which then was in its sixteenth year of dominating the still-developing genre of 24/7 television news. (MSNBC also would arrive in 1996.) Fox’s guise of impa
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